Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday 2025

 March 2, 2025 Transfiguration Sunday

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Luke 9:28-36, (37-43a)

Here we are, the final Sunday before Lent begins.  Transfiguration Sunday gives us a chance to wrestle with an essential question:  who is this Christ?  Why worship Jesus?

Do we worship Christ because of his glory?  The mystical elements of Transfiguration Sunday dazzle us and threaten to overshadow the rest of the story.  What a magnificent tale!  Moses and Elijah appear and along with Jesus, they are transformed into glowing creatures.  A voice booms down reminding us of Christ's chosen and elevated status.

It's easy to understand Peter's response:  we'll stay on the mountain, we'll build a more permanent structure!  But it's also easy to understand why the disciples stay quiet about this mystical experience.  Once they descend from the mountain, they must begin to wonder if they had been dreaming.  And once again, they likely ask themselves, “Who is this man that we’ve been following?”

Jesus then heals a child; he's a success where his disciples have failed. 

Do we worship God in the hopes of harnessing this kind of transfiguring power?  It's easy to understand this impulse.  Then as now we live in a world where pain seems to have the ultimate power.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to cure the sick like Jesus did?  We live in a time where we might get tired of sending sympathy cards.  Wouldn’t it be nice to do a total transfiguration of this world we live in, where we break the bonds of disease, where no one goes to bed hungry, where our foes are vanquished.  If only we could harness the power of God!

But the rest of the lesson for today warns us against this impulse.

Jesus know that he's on a collision course with the powers that rule the world.  In the weeks to come, the disciples will argue about who is greatest, and Jesus will remind them of the nature of his ministry:  to be least.

For those of us who worship Christ because we want transfiguration, it's important to remember what kind of transfiguration we're going to get.  We're not likely to get worldly power because we're Christians--in fact, it will be just the opposite. People will not elect us to be president.  We will not be wealthy; any wealth we get, we’re likely to give away, if we’re following Jesus.

Will we get healing?  Maybe.  But it may not be the kind of healing that we’re desperate to experience.  When we think of healing, we might think of what we see Jesus do in today’s text.  A child who can’t live in society because of demon possession, suddenly transformed into a healthy child.  We might wish for something similar, for ourselves or for our loved ones.  Some of us will get that healing that we long for.  But while Jesus does heal the physically sick, he’s clear that his ministry leads to a much more significant type of healing, a spiritual kind.

Will we be creatures that glow with an otherworldly light?  Maybe this will happen occasionally—but it will be metaphorical, not the kind of literal light that the disciples witness on the top of the mountain.  

The text today reminds us that Transfiguration Sunday gives us a glimpse into a larger spiritual realm—but there’s also the sadness that we can’t stay there forever.  Ah, Transfiguration Sunday which leads us to Mardi Gras, a few last hurrahs before the serious season of Lent, that season of ash and penitence.  Let us stay here in this glow. 

But we can’t stay there forever.  Our spiritual texts remind us again and again that we must come down from the mountain.

However, we can frame that descent into good news, a path before us, the path that brings us off the mountain and into service. Let us not confuse the mountain top for the true relationship that God offers us.

Throughout the Scriptures, we see this tension between the mountain top and the flat land experience. We feel the thrill of meeting God, and then we have to figure out how to live our daily lives afterwards. Some of us will spend our lives in permanent quest mode, going from one mountain top to the next, looking for spiritual thrill.  This quest might not be as dangerous as other pursuits.  But it can keep us from committing to the communities that we live in, between the times when we’re off to the next retreat or monastery. 

Some of us will try to convince ourselves that the mountain top experience wasn't real, that it didn't matter, that it wasn't as profound as we know that it was. Maybe we won’t talk about it because we can’t figure out the right words.  Maybe we have no way of processing what we saw up there on the mountain.  But our text does show us a way, to come down, to serve our fellow humans.

Some of us will try to live our daily lives transfigured: at our best, people, convinced that we have some yoga regime or diet that they need to know about, will ask us for our secret.  At our best, we’ll transfigure the societies around us, casting out the demons that torment so many of us.

Many of us approach Lent in a spirit of transfiguration. We give up something for Lent or we add something for Lent, hoping to feel that thrill of transfiguration. But once Lent is over, we shouldn't forget our Lenten disciplines. It's too easy to let our daily lives take over. It's too easy to forget the Gospel message of transfiguration and resurrection. God calls us to transfigured lives so that we can help in the repair of the world.  And that’s true during Lent and other times, as true for us as it was for those disciples who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain.

New World Order

When I'm on the road by myself, I usually have NPR on, and when I travel on Friday, as I did yesterday, many of the NPR shows are doing news of the week retrospectives.  In the morning, all the commentators expected the afternoon meeting between Trump and Zelensky to end in a minerals deal and perhaps a vision for a path to a peace treaty.

By afternoon, it was not to be.  I first heard about the contentious meeting on a BBC show carried by an NPR station.  It was oddly comforting to hear the discussion in clipped, British accents, even as the subject of the discussion was so catastrophic.

As I listened to Trump and Vance shouting and Zelensky try to get a word in edgewise, I felt that careening disbelief that I've felt so often in the last few weeks.  Really?  Grown ups talk like this?  And then I wondered how we came to have audio.  I imagined some brave White House employee sneaking a recording to a British reporter.

Nope--it was all televised, and later, when I watched the footage, it seemed like a pre-planned spectacle.

It's an astonishing moment that I would never have imagined.  A Republican president embracing . . . Russia???  I came of age during the reign of Ronald Reagan, who must be spinning in his grave.  It's hard for me to imagine how any of this ends well.  I already miss the peace and prosperity slipping through our fingers.  I know, I know, it was peace and prosperity for Europe and the U.S., with proxy wars fought around the globe.

I can imagine any number of scenarios about where the world lurches from here, and none of them are good.  As I was driving, my apocalyptic brain kicked into overdrive yesterday, and I sang "Dona Nobis Pacem" to quiet it.  I'm amazed by how well that works.  This video offers a beautiful rendition, with footage from a cathedral.

I switched over from NPR to a classic rock station just as one song ended and the next started:  "Cult of Personality."  I smirked, but as the afternoon wore on, I did wonder if the d.j. was being deliberate.  I heard "Highway to Hell" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in short order.  Hmmm.  I realize that my English major brain makes all kinds of connections that might not have been intentional.

Last night we went outside to see if we could view the planetary alliance.  I think that we saw it, but as with the playlist that might be making a statement about political struggles, I wasn't sure.  Still, it was good to look up at the sky and to remember how brief our geopolitical struggles are in the long term--still not a comfort when I think of what those geopolitical struggles likely mean for the rest of my life and those who come after, but a cold, planetary comfort nonetheless.